Re: antonyms: regretful & tasty

--- Muke Tever <muke@...> wrote:
> Another good thing is just looking at things the
> culture in question might want
> a word for.  These arent the best examples at all,
> but:
>
That's what I did in Graavgaaln as well.  As I
explored the culture I found quite a few words that
wouldn't translate well into English.  The odd family
structure mean there were seperate words (in the mens
dialect) for father's father and mother's father but
only one to cover father's mother, mother's mother and
aunts of all varieties.

The caste structure required different pronouns for
addressing different castes.  The obsession with
physical culture meant different words for the upper
arm as a function of its ratio to height.

In Lrahran there is a word for the top-side of the
clouds (at first due to the beauty of the topside that
struck me on my first flight later determined to be to
to the use of the cloudtops as observed from a sacred
mountain top in prognostication).

I just last week discovered one of these
hard-to-translate words in Carajena.  The word is
cunsini and is from by compounding cun (with) and
sinin (without).  It means however, by whatever means,
by hook or by crook, in any way possible.  It appeared
in the song translation I just did on Romanceconlang
as a translation for "at least" as in "one sword, at
least, shall guard thy right".  It has derivatves
cunsiniri -- a verb meaning "to do by any means
necessary (whether leagal, ethical, etc. or not)" and
cunsinistu/ -a mening "the kind of person who will
cunsiniri". *g*

These sort of words sorta spring from some invisible
fount of inspiration for me.  If I sat down and tried
to think up a bunch of them at once I doubt I'd get
anywhere.  Your milage may vary.

Adam